Search form

How to Hire an SEO Consultant

There are a lot of people providing SEO consulting, but is that person right for your business? Someone might have experience with SEO, but have little experience consulting for an organization like yours. Consider all these issues when hiring an SEO consultant.

Transcript

Hiring an SEO consultant can be a very challenging task because many people out there are self-proclaimed experts. They think they know search because after reading an e-book or building a website a few months ago and playing around with search, they haven’t had any corporate experience. They haven’t worked with an enterprise account or a multilocation business; doing so requires more strategy and finesse, along with a basic understanding of how businesses work.

Choosing the wrong consultant can be frustrating if you engage a practitioner who has no consulting experience. They can get aggressive trying to push things, as opposed to being patient and working with what you have.

You should expect a consultant to remind you of the importance of a task, but be okay if you want to revisit it later, focusing on the things that you can do quickly.

Another thing that I think is important when you’re thinking about a strategist or a consultant on your team is making sure you have transparency. There should be no secrets. There’s no secret sauce. Everything that you need to do for search engine optimization is available online. The search engines give you a lot of the information that you need through their blogs and so forth. A search engine consultant’s job is to troubleshoot why things aren’t working, why ranking isn’t where it should be.

They should be able to analyze the challenges you have with your existing website, looking at crawl problems and other issues. They should be looking at what the competition is doing; not just one competitor but an aggregate or common themes across the competition. What is changing across the competition that we should pay attention to, monitoring those things every month? Not just the rankings but what competition is doing with their website. Taking all that information will guide you through what you’re doing in search.

The success of inbound marketing relies on getting your content in front of the right people and encouraging those people to take the action you want. A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps people find your content and brings your site referral traffic is essential.

Hiring an SEO consultant can be a very challenging task because many people out there are self-proclaimed experts. They think they know search because after reading an e-book or building a website a few months ago and playing around with search, they haven’t had any corporate experience. They haven’t worked with an enterprise account or a multilocation business; doing so requires more strategy and finesse, along with a basic understanding of how businesses work.

Choosing the wrong consultant can be frustrating if you engage a practitioner who has no consulting experience. They can get aggressive trying to push things, as opposed to being patient and working with what you have.

You should expect a consultant to remind you of the importance of a task, but be okay if you want to revisit it later, focusing on the things that you can do quickly.

Another thing that I think is important when you’re thinking about a strategist or a consultant on your team is making sure you have transparency. There should be no secrets. There’s no secret sauce. Everything that you need to do for search engine optimization is available online. The search engines give you a lot of the information that you need through their blogs and so forth. A search engine consultant’s job is to troubleshoot why things aren’t working, why ranking isn’t where it should be.

They should be able to analyze the challenges you have with your existing website, looking at crawl problems and other issues. They should be looking at what the competition is doing; not just one competitor but an aggregate or common themes across the competition. What is changing across the competition that we should pay attention to, monitoring those things every month? Not just the rankings but what competition is doing with their website. Taking all that information will guide you through what you’re doing in search.

The success of inbound marketing relies on getting your content in front of the right people and encouraging those people to take the action you want. A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps people find your content and brings your site referral traffic is essential.

Scott Brinker is a leading proponent behind the Chief Marketing Technologist movement and his blog, chiefmartec.com, is required reading on the subject. He is also co-founder and CTO of ion interactive, a software company that providers marketers with a platform for creating and testing post-click experiences.